Ice Cream for Three Boys

I just realized that I haven’t posted a riddle in over a year so here’s another one…Credits to Jeremy for sharing this riddle:

Three boys, Ken, Kevin, and Kyle, are promised ice cream by the self-proclaimed God of the universe, Khanh, but with a challenge attached. Khanh randomly puts a blue or red hat on each of Ken, Kevin and Kyle. Each boy can see the hats of the other two boys, but not his own hat. Their goal is to guess the colour of their own hat, but they have only one chance to guess. Khanh counts down from 3 out loud and on “1”, the boys must either shout out the colour they think their hat is or keep quiet and not say anything. If any of the boys guesses the colour of his hat incorrectly OR none of the boys says anything, none of them gets ice cream. However as long as at least one person guesses his hat’s colour right and no one else guesses it wrong, then they all get ice cream.

Any form of communication as soon as the first hat is put on, until they make their guesses, is completely forbidden by Khanh. If the boys try to communicate, Khanh will find out and the they won’t get ice cream.

Question: Granted the boys have time to discuss a strategy beforehand, what strategy can they come up with to maximize the chances of getting ice cream? With this strategy, what are the odds that they will get ice cream?

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Depends how you define communication. If your definition of communication is relatively lax, then my strategy would be to have Ken and Kevin look at Kyle if his hat is red, and look away otherwise. Then Kyle will know in those 3 seconds whether to shout red or blue.

My definition of communication would be “an action that gives anyone else additional information that they couldn’t know had that person not done that action”. Hopefully that doesn’t leave any loopholes as that is not the point of this riddle hahaha.